This was an experimental poster design we made up on Photoshop to improve our skills on the programme. We started off by choosing a background image of the Lord of the Rings and pasting it onto a new A4 page on Photoshop. I then added a slight blur to the image looking under the filters and using a Gaussian blur, this would make the foreground images stand out a lot more. We were then ready to open each image needed for the layers, we pasted them onto the background image and then re-sized each one to fit. I went over each characters image with an eraser to get most of the background to disappear and then blended the edges into the background. We could then see how some of the images appeared darker so I adjusted the brightness of the others so they would all fit in a blend together.

After merging all these layers together I created a separate layer to add a glow to an object which one of the characters is holding, I did this by using a a large soft white brush to add a new source of light. After doing all these adjustments to the images the background felt quite plain, I searched for a leather texture on the internet and imported it, I desaturated it and overlayed it onto the image then decreased the opacity so you could only just see it. You couldn’t see that much of a difference to the image but it looked good how you could only just see it slightly. I altered the colour balance to make the poster look much more authentic and mysterious which really helped.

Finally I added the Lord of The Rings logo to my poster, I positioned it to where I wanted it and again played with the opacity to see whether it looked better lighter or darker. My poster was the finished.

I feel that creating this poster really helped improve my skills on Photoshop, it helped me to understand how to use layers properly and really experiment with techniques that I liked and could hopefully use on my Awareness front cover.